"Everyone deserves to come home at the end of the day," reflects Laurie MacNab, who lost her love of 20 years to a workplace accident.

Laurie MacNab reflects on her life with David Hughes, pictured in a 2009 photo in her arms, at her Halton Hills home. Hughes died Dec. 21, 2010, when a huge load of steel being improperly moved fell on him.

“We did not want the world,” says Laurie. “But we did want to be together.”

For 19 ½ years they were, raising a flock of ducks (and a goose who thinks she is a duck) in the beautiful wooden house next to an apple farm in Milton they built together in 1995.

“It was a pleasure to come home,” says Laurie, her voice breaking.

While she worked in national sales at Quebecor in downtown Toronto, David, a farmer at heart, worked as a truck driver out of Acton transporting heavy steel loads.

“I’m really, really proud to say that,” says the 60-year-old firmly, curled up on an armchair in their home. “He had an agricultural diploma from Guelph and he used that to the best of his ability, but he also knew he had to pay the bills.”

He was a cautious man, her David. “His boss knew he would never drive a truck if it wasn’t safe. He’d bring it back to the yard in Acton, and come home and cut the grass. He never minded,” she says.

On Dec. 21, 2010, at 2:30 p.m., David was killed when 900 kilograms of steel fell on him at an Oakville construction site. He was 63.

It was an avoidable accident — the usual crane used to unload David’s flatbed truck was unavailable so a worker attempted to use a forklift instead. The worker’s employer, Island Steel Erectors Limited, pleaded guilty to failing to ensure that material was moved in a manner that did not endanger a worker.

At a sentencing hearing earlier this month, after a Ministry of Labour investigation, the now-closed company was fined $85,000 plus a 25 per cent surcharge that goes to a provincial government fund for victims.

It has been two very long years for Laurie, waiting to find out how David spent his last moments.

“I did not know which way he was facing. That was very important for me,” she says. “Even though David was this great big guy — he was tough, he built the house, for heaven’s sake — he was afraid of snakes. He’d get this look of horror on his face when he saw one on our property … and I always wanted to know that he didn’t see this accident coming, because he would have had that look on his face.”

Now she finally knows: he was looking away.

Laurie hopes that sharing her story will remind people to be as careful as David was, to ensure all safety precautions are always taken on job sites.

“Everyone deserves to come home at the end of the day,” she says.

She hopes the inquest later this year will reinforce that, as well as recommend some way to ease the long wait that victim families must endure to learn about their loved one’s final moments.

“Hug your loved ones a little closer,” she adds. “It took us a long time to get together. I wanted to date him since I was 13.”

Instead, their first date was a second shot at love for them both after amicable divorces.

David died six months before their planned wedding, scheduled for May 14 (a Saturday), the 20th anniversary of their first date.

On his tombstone — along with his beloved goose and tractor — it says: “When are you coming home to me?”

It’s what he called to ask Laurie at work, every day at 3 p.m.

She has had time to design her own that will one day go next to his.

It says: “I’m home.”

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